29

I wake to the sense I’m sitting up, like I’m shearing free of my physical self, but it doesn’t want to let me go.

When I was a kid, I read a lot about parapsychology, about the soul, the spirit, whatever you want to call it, leaving the body during sleep. There were a few times I thought this happened – once, floating next to the ceiling; another time, being propelled toward the wall; and multiple times like my physical body was reverberating.

I’ve also repeatedly felt what I’m going through now, like I’m trying to tear myself out of an adhesive cradle, but as much as the possibility exhilarates me, the longer it goes, the more afraid I become of what happens next.

But the fear’s nonexistent now. I’m unsure why. Resignation maybe. An indifference to consequences. And although it feels as if my body is begrudging in releasing me, once I embrace what’s happening, once I look forward to whatever comes next, the release is smooth, if not effortless, and then I’m standing at my bedside.

This is something I’ve experienced (or at least I think I have), but never had control of.

What overwhelms me is a mixture of elation and liberation. There’s a freedoms from the pain and exhaustion riddled in my body, an absence of weight and gravity, and no sense of worry, of anxiety, of any earthly concerns.

Perhaps this is what being dead’s like, emancipated from physical trappings.

I’m sure I’m now in some other realm, and even as I contemplate what to do, I already feel like it’s slipping away – everything’s darkening around me. My unconscious mind is claiming me. It wants to drag me into sleep, wants to claw me back into a physical realm where all the pain and exhaustion and disillusion want to smother me all over, because that’s what this world can too often become: the place to carry burdens.

I don’t know how much time passes when I feel the same thing happening again later, and I pop from my body, determined to explore. But the bedroom door is closed, and when I press my hand to it I expect my hand to go through. It doesn’t. The door remains firm. And I do feel it. But then I see it’s not my bedroom door. It’s the door to my bedroom in the house I grew up in.

I’m unsure how I get out, and now I’m walking down the hallway. What occurs to me is that in this world, in this house, I might see my dad, who passed earlier in the year. I make my way to his bedroom, and see my mum sleeping restlessly – only in actual life, she doesn’t use that bedroom anymore. She uses my old bedroom.

Making my way down the hallway, I shout for my best friend who passed away, shouting her name again and again, expecting this is an opportunity to see her – well, if she happened to be hanging around, which I more and more and more doubt. And, naturally, she’s not here, though, either.

The whole house feels empty.

It would be easy to discount this as a dream, but I have a sense of consciousness I never have in dreams, and a delineation of self that never exists either. In dreams, I always feel such a part of what’s happening that there’s no distinction between myself and the dream.

And in dreams when I realise I’m dreaming, when that glimmer of consciousness highlights what’s going on and that smart part of me wakes within sleep, it’s never felt like this.

Right now, I feel distinct from what’s happening.

I feel a sense of self.

I feel me.

Somehow, I find my way in the dining room, There’s a framed photo of one of my nieces on a shelf unit that I don’t think is there in my actual physical life. Ringed around her face is a circle of docile flame. There’s no context to it. As much as that would seem foreboding – like a portent of some ill-fortune – I don’t feel that connotation.

But I don’t know what it means.

Again, the darkness closes in, and I drift in and out of a fitful sleep for the rest of the early morning hours.

When I get out of bed, I’m exhausted like I haven’t been exhausted for a long time.

I reflect on what happened, but in waking I can’t classify it a dream, yet there were elements that were fantastical and have no connection to real life.

What sticks most with me, though, is the prior instances this has begun to happen – and although it’s not a regular occurrence, it’s happened often enough that neither is it irregular – this is the first time I’ve embraced it and leapt into the unknown.

And whatever that means.